ORA Singers: The Open Fund for Organisations
A Composer competition for state-only students; aimed at engaging and inspiring young composers in choral composition, targeting those with potential but not necessarily experience, each of the 10 selected finalists is chosen from a personal statement alongside any piece of composition. The scheme was developed in order to enable young composers with limited access to professional compositional mentoring to access world-class tuition.
Each of the 10 selected finalists is assigned their own dedicated mentor from ORA Singers’ impressive line-up of commissioned composers to guide them in writing a new choral work, to be performed and judged in the Competition Final Concert. The very first ORA Singers Composer Competition took place in 2018, and launched to great success. Finalists had their works adjudicated by Stephen Fry, John Rutter, Susanna Eastburn and Katie Tearle, with several of the finalists going on to study music at top UK universities and conservatoires.
New to the 2020 competition is the introduction of 20 ‘ORA Apprentices’; a secondary tier of young composers who will be invited to be involved in several of the mentoring activities, access to our staff and composers, and free tickets to the Competition Final Concert.